By Micah Murdock, CEO of UpThink Consulting and Associate Director of Online Learning at University of Utah

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Introduction
• 1:26 What is UpThink Consulting?
• 5:44 What is the future of higher ed?
• 17:22 Practical suggestions for here and now
• 27:01 Using Course Templates (in Canvas)
• 35:49 External Tool worth knowing about

What is UpThink Consulting?

UpThink primarily focuses on three areas of service:

• Canvas onboarding and training
• Instructional design for distance, online and live courses
• EdTech Adoption Strategies in the classrom

What is the future of higher ed?

• We are not “going back”
• Ripe for disruption
• Technology is the driver (as always)
• Trends toward industry directed edcuation

Practical suggestions for here and now

• Do the best you can
• Take advantage of the support that is available
• Zoom classes are not online classes
• Over communicate
• No, they won’t just “figure it out”
• Design with consistency
  • Theme and Variation
  • Bounded Choice

Using Course Templates

Designers/Teacher/Faculty

• Use a simple clean homepage
• Simplify the navigation
• Let the features in Canvas do their job
  • Due dates
  • Syllabus
  • Modules
  • Speedgrader

Designers/Admin

• Develop a template import strategy
• Don’t try to control everything
• Get some faculty input
• Get lots of student input
• Pick your integrations carefully then hold your ground

External Tools worth knowing about

• Atomic Apps – Search, Discussion, Polls and Assessments
• Cidi Labs – Design Plus
• Pronto
• Yellowdig
• Gradescope
• Quizlet
• Flipgrid
• Canva
• Padlet
• H5P

Presentation by Tyler Rohrbaugh

Timestamps

In case you wanted to jump to points of interest in the video, here are some timestamps:

1:30 – Purpose of Yellowdig
15:58 – Basic functionality
28:09 – Best practices
30:51 – Community building
33:46 – Measuring engagement
43:22 – Onboarding and initial training

Overview

Authored by Rich Kingsford, Software Development Manager and Adjunct Instructor

The Yellowdig platform has some pretty impressive capabilities – all in the student engagement department. Their features integrate with popular learning management systems (LMSs) and ease the instructor’s maintenance burdens.

In summary, Yellowdig offers rich, asynchronous, discussion features; similar to those found on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Youtube, and the hundreds of other popular social media tools out there. Except the Yellowdig environments are authored by instructors and instructional designers and, therefore, seem more intelligently targeted than 90% of what I see my students (and kids) sharing on social media and video platforms.

Yellowdig also helps instructors and instructional designers identify students who are posting but not engaging with their peers. Or students who initiate topics but then drop off. Or students who frontload or backlog their comments. Or high achieving students who drive engagements for others.

Here are a few claims about the results of using Yellowdig:

I love these objectives. The claims are pretty steep – let’s see if they stack up!

What is asychronous discussion?

Asynchronous discussion tools are new to a lot of us.  These allow two or more people to raise topics, comment on topics, link to resources, attach resources, and acknowledge/respond to comments using emojis (e.g. 😀😎💣🔥♥😆).  Modern tools have more capabilities than the classic forum features (where someone starts a topic and the comments go on and on for 100’s of pages). 

We’ve been enjoying face-to-face and other synchronous discussions for so many years – and they’re great!  I love being with my students, getting to know them, learning how they think, and feeling the joy that comes when they try or learn something new.  Asynchronous discussion tools, like Yellowdig, try to bring all the goodness of the synchronous methods while addressing some of the limitations (language barriers, physical distance, and other accessibility limitations).  Of course there are tradeoffs, but we don’t have to use solely one or the other.  As we explore Yellowdig’s features, keep the pros and cons of asynchronous and synchronous methods in mind.

Emoji-responses

Yellowdig’s most obvious feature is the classic thread-and-respond functionality.  This is wonderful functionality and many tools have this natively.  I really appreciated Yellowdig’s emoji-response capabilities.  They’re bold, flexible, and easy to use.  Students are naturally drawn to these and use them to quickly (one-click) respond to someone’s comment in highly creative and fun ways (acknowledge, agree, disagree, laugh, question, empathize, etc).  Have you ever worked hard on a comment and then wondered if anyone even glanced at it?  Emoji-responses decrease the frequency of this sad event. 

Subtle Point System

Many instructors and instructional designers are accustomed to traditional discussion boards and assign students to do the classic “one topic and two comments” participation assignments. If you do this, aren’t you also discouraging the students from discussing more? What percentage of the students will post only one topic and two comments? Yellowdig’s point system is more subtle – and I love it.

Yellowdig lets the author craft the period points and their implications on grades in highly flexible ways. Tyler explained how they’ll train instructors and instructional designers to craft point systems that offer a variety of ways to gain points, preserving student autonomy. I loved his explanation on how receiving points for others’ comments and reactions on your posts will incentivize students to get involved earlier in the week – discouraging procrastination. Grades and points have long since been used to encourage the behavior we want, but Yellowdig’s more subtle approach wipes out many of the perverse incentives we sometimes don’t see.

Rich Media

We all know students learn in different ways. Some prefer to draw or vocalize their thoughts rather than typing them out. Yellowdig’s Poll, Draw, Attach, Tagging (e.g. #branding), and Record Video features give plenty of variety. These make it a little more comfortable for students to step outside of their comfort zone!

Analytics

Yellowdigs analytics features are pretty powerful.  I see two primary sets of analytics: student-centered ones and content-centered ones. 

With student-centered analytics, I can easily visualize a bell curve showing average, low, and highly engaged students.  Maybe you can help the lows by teaming them up with the highs?  Or perhaps it’s better to put the highest performing students together so they can fly even higher?

With content-centered analytics, I can differentiate between high-consumption and low-consumption content (questions, videos, case studied, etc).  It hurts a little when I see low-consumption on some of my beautiful content, but at least I know where to put my energy now.

Conclusion

I’m a fan.  Very intelligently crafted. Yellowdig has a lot of well-designed, quality, features and they’re targeted right at what students need.  Online courses are tricky.  Face-to-face courses are tricky.  But using a wide variety of activities and tools, including Yellowdig, can ensure no minute in your course is wasted.  Well-designed asynchronous discussion tools, like Yellowdig, can help generate interest in your concepts and they can even spark fires (the good kind).  They can overcome location, language, and other accessibility challenges. 

Thanks Tyler and the Yellowdig team!

Presentation by Eli Luberoff, Founder and CEO of Desmos and Meaghan Maguire, Director of Partnerships

Overview

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Introductions
• 1:00 LTI Versions
• 1:22 Background on Desmos
• 3:54 Initial Reception and Takeoff
• 4:27 Focusing on Access, High-Stakes Assessments, and Curriculum
• 5:50 Desmos Team
• 6:15 Business Model
• 7:44 Partnership Integration
• 8:34 Demo
• 20:13 Emergent Use Cases
• 20:48 Custom Graph Components in Curriculum (internal for now)
• 24:58 Statistics
• 27:48 Accessibility
• 30:14 More Emergent Use Cases – Making Music With Graphs
• 31:26 Unique Benefits of Desmos
• 33:50 Drag-and-Drop support in RCE for students
• 37:40 Performance
• 38:44 Thanks to Desmos

Authored by Kyle Hovey, Software Developer

We are currently going through a renaissance in education fueled by the ever-growing availability of capable computers and prominence of the web browser as a software platform. In STEM especially, concepts are commonly hard to grasp, let alone express. We are seeing an explosion of tools that allow both learners and educators to be more expressive with their academic experience. Perhaps even more importantly, these tools are decreasing the interval in the try/see feedback loop that is at the heart of learning.

If you visit a STEM tutor lab, you are sure to find many screens glowing with Desmos: a revolutionary online graphing calculator. At first glance, a graphing calculator may not seem so impressive, but that is why Desmos is so exciting. Gone are the days of learning the arcane dance necessary to communicate to your ancient and overpriced TI-84 (which runs the same Z80 processor as the original GameBoy™). With Desmos, you can effortlessly play around with concepts previously only accessible to calculator savants. Not only that, but Desmos offers a level of intractability never seen before in a math tool.

The Learning Feedback Loop

When learning a new concept, especially ones abstract as those found in the field of mathematics, learners will need to produce many versions of their own understanding before they find one that fits enough to generate their own ideas on the topic. A textbook provides a pre-processed concept that will not make sense to everyone, so efficient education must focus on the personal journey of each learner and their quest for true understanding.

There are many online graphing calculators these days, but none that afford the same ease and performance that Desmos offers. The simplicity of the tool means that students can rapidly ask questions, make experiments based on those questions, and get answers with profound intractability in their creations. Also, once these experiments have been created, they can be easily shared with a link that anyone with a web browser can use.

Features

What sets Desmos apart from other online graphing tools is the simplicity of the user experience, and the cohesive nature of each component you interact with. Being a purely two-dimensional graphing utility, the most atomic concept in Desmos is that of a function. The key abstraction is that any component of a function can be made interactive by assigning it to a variable, where it becomes a slider. You may also add points, which can be clicked and dragged on the screen. Equations can reference each other, which allows for and organization of concepts that is both convenient for creation and the subsequent parsing by fresh eyes trying to understand the concept.

Recently, Desmos added colors to the app in the form of hue-saturation-value variables that may be referenced in the style for any element in the graph. The hue, saturation, and value can all depend on any existing variable in the graph, making it immensely powerful for producing dynamic visualizations that react in real-time to the users’ actions.

Check out their What do you want to learn about today? resource that links to their FREE calculators, distance and classroom learning, activities, etc.

Desmos also offers amazing accessibility for their graphs. The toolkit now offers a way to listen to graphs so that visually-impaired learners and educators alike can use the tool.

Future

Desmos is showing no signs of slowing down, and is constantly improving their feature set. It will be exciting to see what will be made and shared with their creative platform in the future. What will you make?

Authored by Rich Kingsford, Software Development Manager and Adjunct Instructor

#cryForHelp

I was first asked to adjunct a class in 2012 – I was very excited.  For about 5 minutes…until I discovered adjuncting involved mountains of grading.  Especially essay grading (blech!).  But the non-whiny part of me really wants to build my students’ writing and logic skills…  

Sound familiar?  Today is your lucky day – I’m going to share some hotstrings with you.  I’ll even throw in some other simple macros.  After we’re done, you’re going to wish you could buy me a meal through DoorDash.

Intro to hotstrings

A hotstring is when you type in a short string (series of letters – or a word) and the string gets replaced with whatever other string you’d like.  

Here’s my ‘mycell’ one:

I love to set up hotstrings (and other macros) for grading statements.  Here are some grading hotstrings I recently used for a Finance class in my MBA program:

You could make hotstrings like “q1, q2, or q3” and then the hotstring would erase your one string and replace it with another string.  Hint: a string is just a series of letters, like ‘asdf’ or ‘dog.’ 

To use hotstrings, you first need to create a macro and then run your macro.  A macro is a set of instructions that tell your computer to run a process (e.g. replace ‘this string’ with ‘that string’).  My favorite hotstring or macro tool for Windows is Autohotkey.  For Macs, see how to setup hotstrings on a Mac.

Your first hotstring (using Autohotkey)

If you’d like to make your first Autohotkey script, here are some instructions:

1. Install Autohotkey

2. Copy the two lines below

::Vaguee::Some arguments are a little too general.  It’s good for the arguments to be brief, but they should be specific, insightful, and well defended.
::Unclearr::Some readability problems here.  Please reference the guidelines on this clear writing resource:  https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar/writing/10-tips-for-writing-clear-concise-sentences.htm

3. Open Notepad

4. Paste the two lines and save the file as whateverYouWant.ahk

5. Double-click the Autohotkey file to make it run

6. Type ‘vaguee’ (did it replace the word with your grading statement?)

Cool huh?

“Why did you spell ‘Vaguee’ and ‘Unclearr’ like that?”

• So it wouldn’t mess me up when I type normally. 
• Remember Jim’s prank on Dwight in The Office?  If not, here’s a youtube video on the topic.  Go ahead and watch it… I’ll wait.

So… you actually use these?

I do!  Especially when grading essays.

Except I often use another method, that’s far easier to setup.  I just copy/paste whatever grading statements I want for the assignment and then just erase the irrelevant ones.  So if a paper was perfect, I’d erase all of them.  When I’m feeling especially motivated, I’d copy/paste the student’s statement right before my feedback. 

A quick example: 

“Here’s a dumb sentence a student write.”   Some grammar/sentence structure issues throughout. Suggest using GMAT practice exams to study up on proper grammar.  http://www.majortests.com/gmat/sentence_correction.php

I use this method for my finance papers.  I’ll paste my statements again here:

• Q1.  Must mention EBIT volatility
• Q3.  K-wacc = 9.41%
• Q4.  NPV: $7.99.  PI: 1.7.  IRR: 22.6%

For essays, I used these grading statements (I used my second macro 👆 to navigate these): 

The response contains too many details describing abstract concepts.  Be brief in describing concepts and do so only when explaining your response to the prompt question.

Slightly breaches the length limit.  Specificity, thoroughness, clarity, and insightfulness are good, but should be done within the limit.

A few too many facts from the case without original thought.  The focus should be on original insights in the context of case facts.  Case facts can also be used to illustrate or explain your thinking.

Argument fails to adequately address the question

Insufficient detail on some responses.  Arguments should be specific, insightful, and well defended.

Some grammar/sentence structure issues throughout. Suggest using GMAT practice exams to study up on proper grammar.  http://www.majortests.com/gmat/sentence_correction.php

Please include the questions as topic headers in future assignments

Very good arguments.  Well articulated.  I had a hard time finding flaws in this essay.

Use topic headers.  These help give the reader context and make it so he or she can interpret the content as fast and effortlessly as possible.

Some arguments are a little too general.  It’s good for the arguments to be brief, but they should be specific, insightful, and well defended.

Some readability problems here.  Please reference the guidelines on this clear writing resource:  https://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar/writing/10-tips-for-writing-clear-concise-sentences.html

Conclusion

I joked around in my intro, but I truly believe the best teachers preserve their energy and apply it to the highest priority activities.  Rarely is grading papers my highest priority activity… I’ll admit to some laziness and desire to minimize the time I spend grading papers, but I also care about my students and want, very deeply, to strengthen their logic and writing muscles.  Macros and hotstrings are fun and help me with all of this.

Presented by Michael Hakkerinen

Thank you to Michael Hakkarinen, Harmonize Success Coach at Harmonize for sharing a product demonstration with our team here at Atomic Jolt!  Harmonize has many rich media features that make it fun and easy for students to engage with classmates and course content.  I was especially impressed by the variety of content types (audio recordings, video recordings, annotated images, annotated videos, emojis, text and more).  Below are some highlights.  Thanks again, Michael!

Timestamps

In case you’d like to jump to a highlight in the video above, here are some highlight timestamps.

• 1:20: Executive summary of Harmonize
• 3:10: Basic functionality
• 5:21: Detailed engagement on a post
• 8:46: How an instructor creates a topic
• 13:30: Some advanced features
• 21:10: Zoom integrations (and other integrations)
• 25:45: Upcoming features

Purpose of Harmonize

Authored by Rich Kingsford, Software Development Manager and Adjunct Instructor

Harmonize boosts student engagement in the online or in-person classroom through asynchronous communication tools similar to popular social media platforms.  Harmonize integrates with popular Learning Management Systems (LMSs), including Blackboard, Brightspace, Canvas, and Moodle.  This integration makes Harmonize more accessible to students, teachers, and instructional designers (it can also decrease your set-up hassle too – Woohoo!).

The Essence of Harmonize

The essence of Harmonize, to me, was its peer-to-peer engagement tools.  I’ve seen a few tools that offer asynchronous discussion, but Harmonize’s tools seemed more intuitive, more attractive, and more accessible.  I loved the card concept, where instead of a standard text discussion they engage with a more visual card-style layout where there are images and reactions that are intuitive to students.  On the back of the card, there are more details and space for responses and comments. It’s designed to help students think of their own discussion questions and engage in their own way.

Rich Media

This part impressed me the most.  Harmonize includes all the popular text-editing capabilities (dynamic links, tags, embedded images, styling, and drag-and-drop attachments) plus the ability for students and teachers to record audio and or video!  Straight from your phone or pre-recorded.  What’s more, students can annotate images and video (timestamps) without needing to use a separate tool.  “A picture says 1,000 words,” indeed!

More Features

A few additional features I could help but mention:

• Native 1:1 and group chat, facilitating asynchronous & private conversation (student or teacher initiated). 
• Student tagging, making it easier for students to get their team members’ attention.  
• “Flag as question for the teacher” toggle on any post
• Engagement analytics, including views, comments, responses – both on the positive and negative side, making it easier for the instructor to identify less-engaged students and possibly nudge them.
• Online presence, making it easy to see who is online in the moment
• Zoom integration, allowing you to create Zoom rooms without leaving the window and the ability to post recorded zoom sessions easily in the discussion to engage all members of the class (sidenote: I find it easier to just use a single, personal, web conferencing room the entire semester – I just bookmark and hotkey the room url).

Conclusion

Harmonize offers fantastic engagement capabilities for online, hybrid and face-to-face classes.  Even in my face-to-face courses, I’m using asynchronous discussion tools more often to engage students.  This  can help a shy or embarrassed student move out of their comfort zone and engage in richer conversations. Additionally, it can open the door to self-paced learning, allowing each student in the class to learn as much as they can as individuals. They facilitate organic mentorships – where one student helps another.  Harmonize is easy-to-use and accessible with a WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA rating. I’m especially impressed by their attention to detail on those small, often forgotten, challenges students and instructors face.

You can learn more about Harmonize by attending a webinar or exploring their Best Practice Guide, eBooks, or Product Reviews.